THE NEWS IN PRINT

Portable Document Format or PDF is widely used for storing company documents that needs to be secured from alterations. It is a format prepared for the desktop publishing industry to retain the page characteristics that include size, font, images etc in a 2D document. It is free from viewer's desktop resolution and available fonts.

Suppose you want to create a PDF document which needs to be read only and you want to avert users from copying text, altering the document and take printouts, here's how you do it with Adobe Acrobat:

- Open the Adobe Acrobat software and the PDF document that needs to be secured
- Click on Secure on the taskbar and then select Password Encrypt
- When prompted, change the security settings by clicking on Yes
- In the Permissions tab, check Restrict editing and printing of the document
- Input a password in the Change Permissions Password textbox
- If you would like to share your password with some for printing, then choose the resolution of printouts you want to offer from the Printing Allowed dropdown
- Click OK and save the document

If the secure document needs to be printed, then the user should know the password entered by you in order to do so. But there are many other ways of printing PDFs like printing the screen and taking printouts from a graphic application like Paint. There are softwares that even convert images to text. If the developer takes a step forward, the hacker always takes one more.

There was a time when a new printer would stay at a single place for years. It would be used until it physically broke down. But, like always, things change; I am not sure if it's for the best. Printers are being replaced with an upgrade every few months. As the brands and make change, so does the drivers. So excited are the procurers that they even forget to clean the remains of the old printer before installing the new. On the outset, there shouldn't be any conflicts between the old drivers and the new one; but, you never know. Here's a small guide to remove your old printer drivers before installing a new one. Use this guide at your discretion.

Procedure 1 (Windows XP)
Most printer drivers are installed along with an uninstaller. So, the printer drivers could be uninstalled in a few mouse clicks.

- Click on Start
- Click on Control Panel
- Single click or double click on Add or Remove Programs depending on your desktop setting
- It takes a while for the list of programs to get populated
- Choose your old printer driver from the list. If you have a Lexmark printer, look for Lexmark from the list and delete everything that starts with Lexmark unless you have any other gadgets from Lexmark. It is quite easy to figure out the old printer driver program as long as you know the printer brand.

Procedure 2 (Windows XP)
Some older printers don't come with uninstallers. So, you may have to take the techie way of uninstalling drivers. Its simple, trust me.

- Click on Start
- Right Click on My Computer
- Click on Properties
- Select the Hardware tab
- Hit the Device Manager button
- Scroll Down to the selection that should say "¦. Printer driver and highlight the printer driver
- Click on Action from the menu bar and select Uninstall
- This should clean up your old printer's drivers
- This procedure can be used for uninstalling any other drivers but do it under safe mode for best results. If you still have your old printer connected after uninstalling drivers, Windows might try to install default drivers which could cause uncalled confusion

Uninstalling old printer drivers in not mandatory but a good practice.

There have been several times when I wanted to print posters on my HP F380 printer but the hardware capability had limited my desires. Either I have to get it printed elsewhere or reduce the size of the image to print it on my machine. But, some smart software lets you chop your poster into x number of parts and have each part printed on a separate sheet of A4 size paper. Once all the parts are printed, the different segments could be collaged into your favorite poster.

Posteriza, freeware that runs on Windows, can chop your poster into a desired number of segments and lets you print them on separate sheets. It gives a preview of how the different segments would align to form the poster once re-aligned.

Picasa, a popular photo suite from Google can do the same but has a smaller set of features when compared with Posteriza. However, Picasa lets you geo-tag your pictures using Google Earth, which is extremely cool!

If you have a poster waiting to be printed, fire up your browser, start downloading and print away!